Dracula Unbound (10 page)

Another moment and he forced himself to rise. He placed a hand over his heart as if to still its beating. Then he went to see his friend.

Clift had dragged himself into a sitting position. Blood oozed from under his shirt.

“You know what it was?” he gasped.

“I know it was most ancient and most foul. Are you okay, Bernard? It seemed to dissolve into a—well, into a woman. An illusion. The perspective and everything. Terrifying.”

“It was a lamia, a female monster. There's a literature about it.”

“Fuck the literature. We've got to get out of this corridor. Brace yourself, buddy.”

As he dragged Clift to his feet, the latter gasped with pain. But he stood, clutching his shoulder and managing a grin.

“God knows where we've got ourselves, Joe. Maybe I shouldn't take the name of the Lord in vain …”

“We've got ourselves into more than we bargained for,” Bodenland said. Half supporting his friend, he started down the corridor, which had now regained normal dimensions.

Moving steadily, they made it to the cab in the front of the train.

Bodenland propped Clift in the corridor and made a sudden rush in, where he found a man in overalls working in the grayness.

He sat on a swing stool, handling controls. He was shadowy, his age impossible to tell. And when Bodenland jumped in on him, he swiveled round to exclaim in astonishment, “No, no—you're the man with the bomb!”

This stopped Bodenland in his tracks.

But the driver raised his hands, saying, “I'm still afraid of being hurt. Don't attack me.” He made no attempt to escape.

“You know me?” Bodenland asked. But even as he spoke, he heard the sound of someone approaching down the corridor. Dreading another monstrous apparition, he snatched the driver's gun, which the man had made no attempt to draw.

As he did so, Clift looked into the cab.

“Joe, dozens of them. Second line of defense. The gun, quick!”

He grabbed the gun from Bodenland and at once began firing down the corridor. Bullets from the enemy spanged by. There were cries in the corridor, then silence.

Bodenland went out to see. Whoever the assailants were, they had disappeared, leaving only two dead a few yards away. Clift lifted himself on one elbow.

Kneeling down by him, Bodenland asked him gently how he was.

“The grave—” Clift said, then could speak no more. Bodenland caught him as his head fell and hauled him up into a more comfortable position. Blood welled from the paleontologist's chest. He looked up into Bodenland's face, smiled, and then his face contorted into a rictus of pain. He struggled furiously as if about to get up, and then dropped back, lifeless. Bodenland looked down at him, speechless. Tears burst from his eyes and splattered Clift's cheeks.

He dragged his dead friend into the driver's cabin.

“I'll get you bastards if it's the last thing I do,” he said.

6

The little Brazilian-made plane, a vintage Bandierante, winged high above the eroded Utah landscape and released its passenger from a rear door like some hypothetical bird of prey launching an embryo into the wind.

Mina floated away from the plane, arms outstretched, knees bent, riding the invisible steed of air, controlling it with her pubic bone, steering it with the muscles of her thighs. This was her element, here was her power, to soar above the mist-stricken earth.

No pressures on her here, no relationships to maintain … it was neutral territory. Even her snug green coveralls she chose to regard as her skin, making her an alien visitor to the planet.

And if there were aliens on other planets in the galaxy, let them stride their own skies. Let them not discover Earth, let them not, she thought, disclose themselves to the peoples of Earth. It was difficult enough to find meaning to life in a nonreligious age; how much more difficult if you knew that there were a myriad of other planets choked with living creatures like humans, facing the same day-to-day struggles to survive—to what end?

The image came back to her, as it often did when she steered her way through the atmosphere by her pubis, of herself as a small straggly girl, oldest daughter of a poor family in Montana, when she had gone out at her mother's behest to hang freshly washed sheets on a clothesline. The wind blew, the sheets tugged, she struggled. At a sudden freak gust, a still-wet sheet curled itself round her thin body and carried her, half sailing, down the hill. Was that when she had first yearned for an accidental freedom?

For her, the zing of high altitude could even wash away memories, including more recent ones. The hollowness she felt encroaching on her life could not reach her here. Nor could thoughts of how things were with Joe.

Now the sheets of the wind were snug about her again. She knew no harm. But Utah was coming closer, tan, intricate, neat. There was no putting off for long the demands of gravity, the human condition.

As he laid Clift's body down in the cab, Bodenland felt utterly detached from his own body. As a goldfish might watch from its bowl the activities in the room to which it was confined, the conscious part of him floated while his body went about setting his dead friend out straight, pretending that comfort lay in reverent attention to a corpse. The death, the apparition which had attacked him, not to mention the horrific novelty of the vehicle in which he was trapped, had brought about the detachment. The shock of fear had temporarily disembodied him.

He straightened in slow motion and turned toward the driver. The driver stood tense against a wall, hands by his side. His riven face, gray and dusty, trained itself watchfully on Bodenland. He made no attempt to attack or escape. Only his eyes were other than passive.
Molten zinc
, thought Bodenland, a part of his mind reverting to laboratory experiments.

“You know me? You recognize me?”

“No, no.” The man spoke without moving his head. His jaw hung open after uttering the two syllables, revealing long canines in his upper jaw and a white-coated tongue.

“You said I was the man with the bomb. What did you mean by that?”

“No, nothing. Please—”

Bodenland saw his right hand come up and grab the man by his throat. When the hand began to shake him, the driver almost rattled. He put his hands up feebly to protect himself. His skin appeared made of some musty old material, as if he were a cunningly stitched rag doll.

“Tell me what this train is we're on. Where are we? Who are you?”

When he let go of the creature, the driver sank to his knees. Bodenland had done him more damage than he intended.

“The Un-Dead—the Un-Dead, sir. I won't harm you …”

“You sure won't.” He bent over the driver, catching a whiff of his carrion breath as the man panted. “What are you talking about?”

“I was an airline pilot in life,” said the driver faintly. “You will become like us. You are traveling on the train of the Un-Dead and our Lord will kill you sure enough.”

“We'll see about that. Get up and stop this train.” He wrenched the man to his feet, thrusting him toward the controls. The driver merely stood wretchedly, head bowed.

“Stop the train. Move, you rat. Where are we?
When
are we?”

The driver moved. He pulled open his tunic, ripped his shirt in two with sudden strength, and turned to face Bodenland.

He pointed to his naked chest. So extreme was its emaciation that rib bones stuck out white as if frosted from their cyanotic covering of skin.

“Look,” he said. “Get an eyeful of this, you fool. Do you see any heartbeat here?”

In disgust, Bodenland stared at the dead barrel of chest. He caught the man a blow across the side of his face, sending him reeling.

“You can still feel pain? Fear? You're human in that, at least. I will break open your chest and wrench out that dead heart unless you stop this train.”

Holding his face, the driver said, “The next programmed stop is in what you call
A
.
D
. 2399, the Silent Empire. I'm unable to alter the programming.”

“You slowed in Utah.”

“Utah? Oh, Point 656, yes … That's a sacred site to the Un-Dead. We had to let agents off the train.”

“Okay, you can let me off there. That's where I need to be. How many time trains are there?”

“One, sir, just this one.”

“Don't lie to me.”

“There's just one.” He spoke without emphasis, leaning lightly against the control panels, holding his face, letting the faint illumination turn his body into a seemingly abandoned carcass. “This train shuttles back and forth on scheduled time routes. All programmed. I'm not much more than a supervisor. It's not like piloting an airliner.”

“There must be other trains.”

“There's just the one. To ride time quanta you gobble vast amounts of energy. Solar energy. Very extravagant. Reverse relativism. Invisible at normal speeds. Train can't be seen by the outside world—not unless we're slowing to let agents off.”

The driver smiled, showing the canines more fully. No humor warmed the smile. The lips simply peeled back in memory of something that might once have amused.

“The sheep asks the wolf what it does …”

The detached part of Bodenland watched as he attacked the driver and fell to the floor with him. In their struggle, they kicked Clift's body, making it roll onto its face.

And Bodenland was demanding who had invented this cursed train. The answer was that, as far as the driver knew, the train was the invention of the Fleet Ones.

“The Fleet Ones, sir, are the Un-Dead—the vampires—who rule the world in its last days. This is their train, sir, you've ventured on.”

“I'm borrowing it, and it's going to get me back home to 1999. You're going to show me how.”

The detached viewpoint saw how the creature made to bite Bodenland in the upper arm. But Bodenland took a firm grip of his throat and dragged him to the controls.

“Start explaining,” he said.

“Ummmm ummmm ummmmmmmm. Moon and Mercury, Moon and Mercury, Romance and Remedy … Ummmm.”

The madman Renfield rocked himself in a tight bundle and hummed as if he were full of bluebottles.

The ginger man squatted stolidly in his corner by the cell door, watching, nodding in time with the humming, alert to the fact that Renfield was rocking himself closer. Above them, against the square of window showing blue sky, a spider hung by a thread, well out of the madman's way.

“Ummmm, you're one of us, kind sir, she said, one of the fallen. May I ask, do you believe in God?”

Having uttered the Almighty's name, he fell into fits of laughter, as if the hallowed syllable contained all the world's mirth.

“Yes, I do believe,” said the ginger man. “I think.”

“Then you believe in Hell and hellfire.”

“Those I certainly do believe in.” He smiled wanly, and again the madman laughed.

“I'm God. I'm God and I'm hellfire. And where are these items contained? Why—in blood!” He pronounced the word in savage relish, striking his skull violently as he did so. “In blood, in the head, the head, kind sir, the napper. The napper's full of blood. There are things that peer in here of a night … things which cry and mew for the blood. You see, it's scientific, kind sir, she said, because … because you need the blood to drown out the thought. You don't need thought when you're dead, or silver bells or cockhole smells or pretty maids all in a row, because when you're dead you can do anything. You can do anything, kind sir, I assure you. The dead travel fast. Ummmm.”

The ginger man sighed, as if in at least partial agreement with these crazed sentiments.

“Can you tell me what these things look like which peer in at you at night?”

Renfield had rocked himself very close now.

He put a dirty finger against the wall, as if pointing to something unseen by others.

“There, you see? They come from dead planets, kind sir. From the Moon and Mercury.” He ground his teeth so violently that his intention might have been to eat his own face. “Ummmm, they're a disease, wrapped in a plague, masquerading as life. Life—yes, that's it, life, ummmm. And we shall all become like them, us, by and by, if God so wills.”

On the last word, he sprang at the ginger man, screaming, “Give me a kiss of life, kind sir, she said!”

But the ginger man was alert, leaped to his feet in time, fended off the madman with his silver-headed cane.

“Down, dog! Back to your kennel, beast, Caliban, or I'll call in the warden and have you beaten black and blue.”

The madman retreated only a step and stood there raging or pretending rage, showing teeth, brandishing claws. When the ginger man caught him lightly over the shoulders with his cane, he desisted and crawled on hands and knees back to the far corner, by his mattress. There he sat, looking upward, innocent as a child, one finger stuck deep into his ear.

A rhombus of sunlight crept down the wall, making for the floor as noon approached, slow as time and as steady. The ginger man remained by the door, unmoving, in a less threatening attitude, though he still had his stick ready.

Almost as stealthily as the sunbeam, the madman began to roll on the stone floor. His movements became more exaggerated as he tried to tie himself into knots, groaning at the same time.

The normally genial face of Renfield's visitor was grave with compassion.

“Can I help in any way?” he asked.

“Why do you seek my company in this fortress?”

“It's a fair question, but I cannot deliver you the answer. Tell me if I can help you.”

Renfield stared at him from an upside-down viewpoint.

“Bring me boxes of spiders to eat. Spiders and sparrows. I need the blood. It's life, kind sir. Life's paper. Seven old newspapers make a week in Fleet Street. The Fleet Ones can eat up a week with their little fingers, this little finger on the right.”